The Wolf-hunt

Judith awakened with all the starry infinitude of sky for a canopy. In the
distance loomed the foot-hills, watchful sentinels of her slumbers; and,
sloping gently away from them, rolled the plain, like some smooth, dark
sea flowing deep and silently. Judith, a solitary figure adrift in that
still ocean of space, sat up and watched the stars fade and saw the young
day peer timorously at the world that lay before it. Her mind, refreshed
by long hours of dreamless sleep, turned to the problem of impending
things, serenely contemplative. The passing of many mornings and many
peoples had the mountains seen as the wreathed mists came and went about
their brows, and to all who knew the value of the gift they gave their
great company, and to such as could hear, they told their great secrets.
Judith's prayer was an outflowing of soul to the great forces about her, a
wish to be in harmony with them, to remember her kinship, to keep some
measure of their serenity in the press of burdens. The way of the Indian
was ever her way when circumstance raised no barriers; the four walls of a
house were a prison to her after the days lengthened and the summer nights
grew warm. To the infinite disapproval of that custodian of propriety,
Mrs. Dax, she would make her bed beneath the stars, night after night, and
bathe in the cold, clear waters of the stream that purled from the
white-capped crest of the mountains.

"Nasty Injun ways!" scoffed Leander's masterful lady, consciously superior
from the intrenchment of her stuffy bedroom, that boasted crochet-work on
the backs of the chairs and a scant lace curtain at its solitary window.

Judith, going to her favorite pool to bathe, saw that it had shrunk till
it seemed but a fairy well hid among the willows. A quarter of a mile
above was another pool, hidden like a jewel in its case of green,
broidered with scarlet roseberries and white clematis; and towards this
she bent her steps, as time was a-plenty that morning. She kept to the
stones of the creek for a pathway, jumping lightly from those that were
moss-grown to those that hid their nakedness in the dark, velvet shadows
of early morning, her white feet touching the shallow stream like pale
gulls that dipped and skimmed. "Diana's Pool," as she called it, was
always clear. It lay half hid beneath a shelving rock, a fount for the
tiny, white fall that crooned and sang as it fell. And here she bathed, as
the east fla